Publishers will look elsewhere if it's not implemented... like TBL said "back to Flash" even though they pretty much never left Flash or Silverlight. But it would be amusing to see them get what they want in HTML5 only to find out the shiny new DRM they backed is actually built to make it easier for people save full quality videos to their own computer (the shock! the horror!)

Even something that hasn't been cracked yet programmatically can be bypassed by using screen capture software, but all "useful" DRM relies on obfuscation of the decryption method and closed-source code. The Encrypted Media Extensions spec is openly published and if it ends up in an open source web browser someone could easily add an on/off switch or a download button, perhaps even officially (Mozilla are you listening???)

One upside that seems to be overlooked is that EME could be used for encrypted live video streams over HTTP. There are already javascript crypto libraries that can be used to securely transfer live text over HTTP, and the speed of DH key exchange operations will improved when the native "Web Cryptography API" starts being implemented in browsers.

So a crutch for the content industry's shiny new broken-by-design DRM might actually be a powerful tool against surveillance.

Adobe has announced diminished support on certain platforms but it's not like they gutted the team and boarded up the doors yet. They still actively maintain ARM and x86 ports of Adobe AIR and Flash Player.

Flash Player for Android Ice Cream Sandwich unofficially works on Jelly Bean.

Microsoft amusingly enabled Flash Player by default in an update for Surface RT devices yesterday, probably to prevent Surface Pro devices from completely cannibalizing sales, yet like most other Windows apps there's not even a Silverlight browser plugin for RT...

Blame should be squarely on the registrar for handling the situation like they did. Taking down t.co didn't even take down the phishing site, as it was only linking to one. How many times have we heard a story like this happen before at different levels of the internet food chain (site->datacenter->registrar->government)? This will continue happening forever but it can become less annoying if there was an automated scheme in place to send browsers to an alternate location or two.

If they hacked the FBI they probably were smart enough to send the data to a server somewhere that they anonymously paid for, rather than trying to push 3TB over 7 proxies. It would have still taken a while but not more than a few days over a fiber uplink the FBI should be using.

Large upload monitoring can be thwarted by splitting the data into smaller packets. Any small leak could be damaging on it's own. If they they are trying to stop the problem at that point, they've already lost. I don't see any reason a dossier on Apple devices and their owners would need to be that accessible in the first place.

Perhaps they intercepted a plot to have man-in-the-middle attacks on unsuspecting attendees. They can enforce the ban by following the radio signals to their source. Turning off SSID broadcasting is effective in evading simple scanning but not guaranteed for more sophisticated methods they could use.

I know it's been blocked from viewing online, but the copies probably weren't deleted from their servers. Here's an example of a judge ordering a company to remove a robots.txt file from their website so historical pages could be restored and the Wayback Machine could be used for discovery purposes:

As far as I know they don't delete snapshots if someone just puts up a robots.txt file. When they launched the new Wayback Machine about a year ago I was able to access snapshots of sites that were blocked for years. My theory is that they didn't import the existing exclusion database from the classic Wayback Machine, but had each site's robots.txt recrawled. That sometimes left open a window of 5-10 minutes to browse a site that was supposed to be blocked. I think if someone wants something truly removed from their servers they need a court order and as a library they have some protections against that happening.

Well it's possible to add a unique frame in any video stream server-side with an ID on top but a client-based solution would be more cost effective. Another "problem" content industries would have with an open streaming format is that it would conflict with their ideas about charging for permanent copies. I'm not a supporter of DRM because there's no value added to the consumer and on the business side of things it's pretty stupid since the decryption keys are stored in memory it can always be cracked somehow. Or if a DRM system hasn't been cracked yet, people can simply use screencap hardware or software to save the stream for personal use. I'm also not a supporter of Silverlight. I'm just hypothesizing that what they'd probably decide to use anyway can be adapted to catch some people who rebroadcast.

If advertising is still the major money-maker for professional sports (and, along with merchandise, it is), why wouldn't they want to increase their reach by offering their own free advertisement-laden stream?

Online broadcasts and television broadcasts would be in competition for the same eyeballs as they are now in other sectors. Legacy players don't want to change especially if online ads don't pay them as much(they don't... yet). The leagues, broadcast networks and probably the players unions will push back against the internet as long as they keep getting record profits. If television continues to decline they might be forced to stream someday or mess with the internet before that can happen by lobbying Congress to pass laws like PIPA or SOPA.

If they went with free streams and used the Silverlight platform (like Netflix, NBC Sports - Olympic Games, etc) they could set up their player to receive a command to display a unique ID on top of the video in random places that can be referenced back to the viewer's IP address.

When someone rebroadcasts a stream via a screencap program, all the network would have to do is send out the command during the game and see the IDs appear instantly on the unauthorized streams. A free stream is low hanging fruit so you can bet some people would easily be caught by this. They could kill the stream for that individual user and then hit them with a lawsuit or criminal charges. They could later prop up those cases in a PR campaign.